The uneasiness that memory brought him did not drain away. He checked his sensors and found Three Flight formed up around him. Wedge’s One Flight had the lead and Janson’s Two Flight had swung slow toward Distna. Nrin Vakil’s snoopscoot flew to the rear of Two Flight.
The recon X-wing slowly started to play out a pair of sensor pods connected to the ship by thick cables. They gathered up data to be sorted and stored in computer equipment that occupied all the space that normally would have housed an X-wing’s proton torpedo launchers. The recon ship also did without lasers because the charging coils leaked enough energy to overpower the sensitive probes the ship trailed.
If Nrin gets into trouble he can jettison the pods and run, but that’s about it.
Corran keyed his comm unit. “Nine here. Three Flight in and running. Rear scopes clear.”
“Alpha operational. Pods locked in position. Commencing initial run now. Range to target, one thousand kilometers.”
Nrin cruised the snoopscoot past Two Flight and flew it with a very gentle hand on the stick. Corran marveled at how the Quarren pilot put the ship through gentle turns and slow rolls that kept the pods spaced evenly apart. Though the pods were not that large—not much larger than spare fuel pods, in fact—trailing them out behind the fighter like that created all sorts of problems by altering the flight characteristics of the X-wing. While fighter jocks considered themselves the elite—and Nrin had ample kills in his history qualifying him as such—his adept handling of the recon ship showed how skilled a pilot he truly was.
“Alpha here, Lead.”
“Go ahead, Alpha.”
“I am negative for activity from Distna on first pass.” Nrin hesitated for a moment. “I would like permission to come in at five hundred klicks. Storm activity in the gas giant may be masking energy readings from the moon’s interior.”
Tycho’s voice came on the comm channel. “Lead, that close a run will move Alpha and escorts out of quick escape range.”
“I copy, Two. Nine, please take Three Flight up to guarantee our exit vector.”
“As ordered, Lead.” Corran rolled starboard and pointed his fighter toward the gas giant. “Three Flight, we’re holding the door open.”
A series of double clicks on the comm channel confirmed his pilots’ understanding of his orders. They spread out a bit and locked their S-foils into attack position. Ooryl remained in Corran’s port rear quarter, while Inyri dropped into Asyr’s starboard rear quarter.
“Whistler, get me some readings on the storms on that gas giant.” As he gave the order Corran tried to tell himself
it was because the information would be useful upon their return to Corvis Minor to destroy the Pulsar Station. The logic of that explanation faded both in the light of the data Nrin would be collecting and the fear beginning to trickle into Corran’s guts. He stared up at the orange ball streaked with gray and shot through with lightning, fearing a vision of the Pulsar Station rising from the planet’s misty depths.
He saw nothing and tried to relax.
Then Whistler hooted anxiously.
Corran glanced at his sensors, then up at the gas giant. Black specs rose up through the clouds, looking for a moment like insects trapped between two panes of transparisteel. Though kilometers distant, he knew what they were: TIE fighters, Interceptors, and Bombers. He keyed his comm unit. “Lead, I have multiple contacts coming up out of CM-Five. Eyeballs, squints, and dupes, enough for a squadron of each.”
“I copy, Nine. We’ve got contacts coming from Distna. Similar numbers.”
Corran’s mouth went dry.
Six squadrons!
Krennel had deployed a full fighter wing against the Rogues and their positioning meant two things. The first was that the whole Pulsar Station lab was nothing more than bait to lure the Rogues to this place and slaughter them. Corran realized such a conclusion was the height of paranoia, but that didn’t shake his conviction that it was right. Everything he’d seen suggested that Krennel was the sort of commander who would stop at nothing to kill his enemies, and Rogue Squadron had made an enemy of Krennel long before Corran had ever joined it.
The second conclusion he came to was that Krennel had sources inside the New Republic that told him when the Rogue operation was going off. Spies had often plagued Rogue Squadron in the past. Corran had vaped one, Erisi Dlarit, but vaping everyone feeding information to Imperials and warlords would be a difficult task.
And a task that would take far more time than we have left to us.
Because of the vast distances in space, the Rogues and their counterparts could see each other long before they
could engage each other. Minutes would pass before they would close to effective fighting ranges. Having time to think about what was coming seldom did a warrior any good—and training was meant to take over when thought wasn’t possible.
You’re leading Three Flight, Corran. Prep them for what’s coming.
Corran reached out and switched his comm unit to Three Flight’s tactical channel. “Okay, Rogues, this is how we do this. Whistler, designate each of the incoming Interceptors with a unique ID number and squirt three of them to each of us. We’ve got six proton torpedoes and we use them to burn the squints, got it? We engage them at range and pop them, hard. They’re likely to be a bit out in front of the others because they’ll be wanting kills.”
He glanced at his monitor. “Next wave will be the eyeballs. We blow through them and go after the dupes. We want to pull the eyeballs away from our exit vector so Wedge and the others can get out, got it? We mix it up with the dupes and create a lot of targets out there. Call for help when you need it, and let’s slag them.”
“I copy, Nine.” Ooryl’s voice came through calm and strong.
“As ordered, Nine.” Inyri’s voice betrayed no anxiety, but came through a bit subdued.
“Targets logged and firing solutions being prepped, Nine.” Asyr’s reply carried with it a hint of anger at the audacity of Krennel plotting the ambush. “After we finish our targets, we help the rest of the squadron, right?”
“Right, Eleven.” Corran smiled, then punched up the squadron tactical frequency. “Lead, Nine here. We’re prepped to hold the door open.”
“I copy, Nine. May the Force be with you. We’re engaging now.”
Corran glanced at his main monitor. “I copy, Lead. We have contact in two minutes.”
Out in the distance, the flashes of light from the X-wings boiling into a dogfight could be seen as the flickerings of debris sparking against his shields. He punched up a request for data on Nrin’s snoopscoot and saw that it had jettisoned
its pods. Shields looked solid and the changing vector data on the ship suggested Nrin was dancing it in and out through the dogfight, offering himself as an elusive target for the enemy.
Whistler beeped as the last fifteen seconds to target scrolled down. Corran dropped his aiming reticle over the distant form of an Interceptor and watched the torpedo targeting box turn yellow. Whistler’s beeping increased in intensity and frequency, then became a solid tone as the box went red. Corran hit his trigger and launched a torpedo.
He immediately punched up his second target Interceptor, but that ship began juking fiercely. He tried to get a lock on the third, but it bounced around too much as well.
Either they have early warning systems, or they’re just being cautious.
Other proton torpedoes streaked out from Three Flight and headed toward the incoming TIEs. Two Interceptors winked out of existence, but the rest boiled on undaunted. Corran rolled to port, then pulled back on his stick for a climb that would take him perpendicular to their line of attack. He inverted, presenting his cockpit canopy to them, then pulled back on the stick again and rolled onto a course that brought him in above their flight plane.
The squints began a climb to come up after him, so he barrel-rolled to port and cruised down toward them. He nudged his stick right, boxing one of the Interceptors. The box went red immediately, so Corran pulled the trigger. The proton torpedo shot out and slammed into the squint at point-blank range. It pierced the ball cockpit, then exploded, blasting the Interceptor into a microfine hail of metal, flesh, and fabric.
Corran flew straight through the explosion, then pulled his X-wing up into a tight loop. He chopped his throttle back to tighten the loop even more, then targeted his last squint. The aiming reticle went red and he launched another torpedo. It jetted away on blue flame, then curved up sharply after the Interceptor. The pilot twisted away at the last second, but the proximity fuse made the torpedo detonate.
As fast as the squint was, it wasn’t faster than the
torpedo’s shrapnel. A metal storm shredded the starboard solar panels and continued on to hole the cockpit. The ship didn’t explode, but it did begin a slow spiral that aimed it toward the gas giant.
Its gravity well is so deep it will swallow that ship whole and pretty much anything else that’s left out here.
An explosion shook Corran’s X-wing and he immediately knew he was in serious trouble. One of the TIE Bombers had nailed him with a concussion missile. The fact that he actually felt the residual effects of the blast meant that his inertial compensator wasn’t functioning right. His rear shield also showed damage, but before he could shift power around to reinforce it, a squint laced his rear shield with fire, collapsing the shield and pouring energy into his upper starboard S-foil.
Corran felt a weird vibration and heard a corresponding whine for a half second before the engine exploded. The squint’s laserfire had melted part of the centrifugal debris extractor, which threw it out of balance and ripped it free of its supports. Parts of it sprayed back through the engine, shattering it and breaking that S-foil clean off. More debris shot out and peppered the starboard side of the fuselage. One huge chunk slammed into the fighter’s transparisteel canopy, spalling off fragments. One of them lashed Corran’s right cheek, cutting him along the bone, then the atmospheric pressure within the cockpit blew the transparisteel panel and all debris out into space.
The personal magnetic containment bubble projector each pilot was issued clicked on immediately, cocooning Corran in a thin layer of breathable air. Even with a full power charge, Corran knew he’d only have a hour or so of breathable air, and the cold of space would kill him sooner than that. He would have expected such a realization would fill him with fear, but he found a calm inside that surprised him.
And allowed him to act.
He slapped his throttle down to zero, which stopped the port engines from pushing him around in a flat spin. Using the etheric rudder he managed to counter the spin. He
got himself oriented, with the gas giant below him and the dogfight above, then keyed his comm device.
“Nine is hit, two engines gone. I have power, so if you bring someone in front of me, I’ll shoot them.”
No one acknowledged his call, but he knew all of them had more important things to do.
As do I.
“Whistler, are you okay back there?”
The droid blatted harshly.
“No, I didn’t think they would have gotten you. Keep me informed if I have more missiles coming. I’m shifting power to shields now.” A glance at his monitors showed the shields greening up nicely, which meant he could survive two or three more runs by a squint before it took him down. It wasn’t much, but it was much better than being dead outright.
He reached beneath his command chair and pulled out a small metal box. He unlatched it and, from a compartment built into the lid, pulled out a thick duraplast panel. He brushed away the last traces of transparisteel from the broken panel, then slid the duraplast panel into place. It rattled around a bit, but a tube of sealant from the same kit provided a bead of foam that hardened to hold the panel in place.
Corran closed the box and returned it to its place beneath the seat.
I don’t think those repairs were ever supposed to be managed in combat, but I’ve got nothing else to do at the moment.
The duraplast panel was nowhere near as strong as the transparisteel one it replaced, but it was only meant to hold a single atmosphere in and make the cockpit airtight. It would never deal with laserfire as well as the transparisteel would, but having atmosphere and heat was an immediate concern for Corran.
“Whistler, give me more atmosphere and push the heat.”
When life-support indicators rose enough, Corran turned off the magcon device. Heat hit him solidly, but a shiver ran through his body anyway. “Two engines gone, I’m dead.”
Whistler’s keening tone sliced through his self-pity.
Corran glanced at his monitor and smiled. “You’re right, I still have torps and some lasers. Might be dead, but I can also be a nasty corpse. Get me a readout on the battle.”
The data dump Whistler provided stunned Corran. Three Flight had faced thirty-six TIEs, but that number had already been pared down to twenty-one. Corran had three confirmed kills. The same went for Ooryl and Inyri had four. Asyr had accounted for five and even as he studied the data, another one was toted up as a kill.
Corran ruddered the X-wing around to find her. Her X-wing flashed through the dogfight with a pair of TIEs hot on her tail. She had the X-wing dancing up and down and side to side, letting their lasers slash green bolts wide. In the distance some of the bolts hit other TIEs, and somewhere along her line of flight an eyeball or dupe would catch her quad laserfire. Asyr was flying as he’d never seen her fly before.
Asyr’s X-wing broke hard to port, then immediately rolled up onto its starboard S-foil and cut back along the way it had come. A roll back to port brought her ship back on the tails of the TIEs that had been following her and managed to overshoot her as she pulled the tight turns. A quartet of red laser bolts burned through one eyeball, letting loose a seething golden cloud of energy that devoured the ship.
A little rudder reoriented her ship and let her blast her second TIE. The shots evaporated the fighter’s starboard solar panel. It began a roll that took it high and out toward the gas giant. Asyr made no attempt to follow it or fire again. She rolled right and started a climb right back into the fight.